Grafting helps pepper plants deal with drought

An experiment using the technique of merging two plants, known as grafting, resulted in higher fruit yield during periods of less rain. Plants also grew much better in salty soil, a by-product of drought, the researchers found.

Chilis. Image credit: Ryan Bushby/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Peppers are native to Mexico, but are grown in many developing countries – both as the bell pepper vegetable and chili pepper to make spices.

The plant is a particularly important commercial crop in Latin America and Asia. Around 26 million tons of peppers were grown commercially around the world in 2007.

The Spanish research team took saplings of commercially grown Adige Lamuyo peppers and grafted these onto wild peppers. They also grew the pepper on its own as a control group.

For the third part of the experiment, the researchers grew the grafted and original plants outdoors in one normal field and one with salt and irrigation problems.

The research showed that peppers grafted onto Capsicum anuum, a wild pepper plant, were much better at dealing with drought conditions and high levels of salt in the soil. The yield of the grafted plants was 40 per cent higher than that of the ungrafted plants grown from seed.

“Pepper grafting could become an environmentally friendly adaptation strategy,” says Angeles Calatayud, a researcher at the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias in Valencia, Spain, and co-author of the paper. “Grafting allows for the combination of the desired shoot characteristics with roots that can overcome environmental stress.”

Grafting is done by cutting a plant off near the root, shaping its stalk into a wedge and fitting this into a matching groove on the severed stem of another plant.

The technique is used for many other vegetables as a means of dealing with stress factors such as extreme climate conditions and toxic soil. Grafting is common in the farming of watermelon, tomato and cucumber. In Spain, almost all watermelon are grown from grafted plants.

The grafting technique is also used to protect plants against pests, which decreases the need for expensive pesticides. (SciDev.Net)

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